MFA Students

Our students come from all over the country—all over the world—and the work they produce is as singular as they are. What they have in common is a lifetime membership in the Pitt writing community. Since our MFA program began, our graduates have published an impressive number of books in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In the past 20 years, our students have won major book publication and literary prizes, including the Barnard Women Writers Award, the Nelson Algren Award, The Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the Whiting and Tufts Awards for emerging writers.

In the last few years alone, they have won or been finalists for fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; the 2008 Slapering Hol Press chapbook competition; the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; Wordstock 10 Short Fiction competition; International Association of Business Communicators’ Award of Honor in News Writing and Feature Writing; the 2008 National Magazine Award; the 2008 National Poetry Series contest (judged by Yusef Komunyakaa); the 2007 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition; and the 2008 Fence/Motherwell prize.

For more information about the professional activities of our graduates, please check out our Twitter and Facebook pages.

Current and Recent MFA Students

Lila Bonow

Lila Bonow, Poetry - lsb59@pitt.edu

Lila Bonow (she/her) is a poet from a counterculture family in Seattle, Washington. She is interested in memory, performance, the significance of place to the diasporic, the lacunae between deeds and desires, and artificial waterfalls. Currently, Lila is working on a collection focused on film, Blackness, voyeurism, and obsession.

Before pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, Lila spent five years working as a radical reproductive rights activist for the organization, Shout Your Abortion. She holds a BA in English with an Emphasis in Creative Writing from Seattle University. She loves dressing up, being immersed in water, walking, and sleeping. 

Aya Burton

Aya Burton, Poetry - ayb22@pitt.edu

Aya Burton was raised in Massachusetts and is pursuing an MFA in poetry. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Scripps College. Before coming to Pitt, she co-taught and mentored in English classes and multi-genre writing workshops for K-12 students in the Inland Empire, CA and southern Spain. Her work explores states of flux in time and place.

Abdelrahman ElGendy

 

Abdelrahman ElGendy, Nonfiction - abe36@pitt.edu

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was a six-year political prisoner in Egypt between 2013 and 2020. While in prison, ElGendy started and earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Ain Shams University.

He is a Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Nonfiction Writing MFA, a Heinz fellow at Pitt's Global Studies Center, a 2021 Logan Nonfiction fellow, a 2023 Tin House Workshop scholar, an awardee of the 2023 Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Nonfiction by Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a finalist for the 2021 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.

ElGendy's writing is engaged with counter-narratives of history, the role of writing and art as forms of resistance, and what it means to inhabit spaces designed to erase you—and insist on being.

His writing appears in the Washington Post, New Lines Magazine, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), Mada Masr, and elsewhere. You can find him at https://www.abdelrahmanelgendy.com/ and on Twitter @El_Gendy_95

 

Sofia Garner

Sofia Garner, Fiction - sgg38@pitt.edu

Tyler Henderson

Tyler Henderson, Fiction - tjh125@pitt.edu

Miles Johnson

Miles Johnson, Poetry - mej121@pitt.edu

Miles believes that the world would be better off if there were no borders at all, but manages to rep his home, Washington DC, with fervor and gratitude. He loves: his Granny and all the other Black folks who watch out and over him; following NBA basketball, even to his own emotional detriment; and playing video games. You can find (some of) his work at blackandoutside.com, and if you're lucky you can find him on Twitter and Instagram @blackandoutside.

Laura Kenney

Laura Kenney, Poetry - lak201@pitt.edu

Laura Kenney is a holobiont composed of many living organisms, one of which is human. They are also a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and experimental texts; a film and digital photographer; and a conceptual artist. Their poetry has been published in Ghost City Review and High Shelf, among other outlets, and their visual art has been exhibited at the David Winton Bell Gallery and The Granoff Center for the Arts, among other venues. They received their bachelors in Literary Arts at Brown University as a first-generation college graduate. In addition to making a home in their body, Laura also makes a home in Providence, Rhode Island, where abandoned tunnels, archival residues, and mycelial blooms inspire their work. You can find more at laura-kenney.com.

Jason Kuo

Jason Kuo, Nonfiction - jak584@pitt.edu

Jason Kuo is a writer and attorney.  He earned his BA from Yale University and his JD from New York University School of Law.  He is interested in cults, corporations, diasporic communities and meaning-making in contemporary society.

Sangi Lama

Sangi Lama, Fiction - sal290@pitt.edu

Sangi Lama is a writer from Hetauda, Nepal. She immigrated to the United States at the age of four and grew up in Beaverton, Oregon. Her writing explores love, family, and separation through Nepali and Nepali American experiences. 

She graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and previously worked as the Marketing Assistant at Tin House. 

She is an MFA candidate in Fiction and a current Dietrich Fellow.

Sandra Lee

Sandra Lee, Fiction - sal287@pitt.edu

Sandra Lee is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She is working on an interlinked short story collection about members of a Korean American church in Queens.

Abigail Lee

Abigail Lee, Nonfiction - avl40@pitt.edu

David Lo

David Lo, Poetry - hsl45@pitt.edu

Anna Millard

Anna Millard, Fiction - adm237@pitt.edu

Anna Denise Millard is a fiction MFA candidate with a BA in Playwriting from Emory University. She's worked for 8 years as a professional advertising and editorial writer in NYC, from writing commercial scripts for ADT Security to celebrity gossip articles for Refinery29 and billboards for The Wall Street Journal. Her short stories have been published in The Dillydoun Review and her plays have been produced at Essential Theatre in Atlanta. Her areas of interest include the American South, film criticism and theory, and media studies. Her writing takes frivolity very seriously.

Hans Park

Hans Park, Fiction - hap90@pitt.edu

Avery Robinson

Avery Robinson, Poetry - mar544@pitt.edu

M. Avery Robinson is a Black poet and punk from Central Florida. They received their BA in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where they interned at the Southeast Review and were the recipient of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Award.

Their work dances in the liminal soundscapes between hip-hop, punk-rock, anime, and Black folklore, transitioning between them as they follow their ear to every note. With an eye for where history intercepts the present, they behold not just the suffering of their bloodline, but the pleasure and mosh-pits of Black euphoria in America’s Southeast too. Their poems have appeared in Interim Magazine, museum of americana, Saw Palm, and are forthcoming in Obsidian and Hunger Mountain. If not at workshop or reading a book, you’ll find them wherever the music’s the loudest.

Kandala Singh

Kandala Singh, Poetry - kas739@pitt.edu

Kandala (she/her) is a writer, qualitative researcher and teaching artist from New Delhi, India.

Kandala works as a creative writing coach, and holds a joint Masters degree in Human Rights Practice from the Universities of Gothenburg, Roehampton and Tromsoe. She has worked on gender and development issues in India for over a decade.

Her poems appear in Rattle, Eclectica, Hindustan Times, Sweet: A Literary Confection and Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among other places. She is the recipient of a Dietrich Fellowship from the University of Pittsburgh, and a 2023 Katherine Bakeless Contributor Award in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. 

She reads poetry for Epiphany Magazine. You can find her at www.kandalasingh.com.

Megan Valley

Megan Valley, Nonfiction - mev66@pitt.edu

Megan Valley is a writer and journalist from Michigan pursuing an MFA in creative nonfiction. She earned her B.A. in English and the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame and was most recently a Report For America corps member covering local education issues in southwest Illinois. Her writing is focused on the environment, Catholic culture, local news, and so-called wellness culture. 

Andrey Vinogradov

Andrey Vinogradov, Nonfiction - anv129@pitt.edu

Kira Witkin

Kira Witkin, Nonfiction - kmw205@pitt.edu 

Kira Witkin is an essayist and journalist with more than 100 bylines published/forthcoming for NPR, The Missouri Review, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications. She is writing a reported memoir about self-described alien “abductees,” including her own UFO-chasing father, to explore the politics and stigmatization of belief. Kira’s writing has been recognized through the Robert Hayden Scholarship, the Dietrich Fellowship for Creative Writing, and the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Circle Awards. Find her on Twitter @KiraWitkin and her website, KiraWitkin.com.